Biz Stone, Twitter Inc (TWTR) Co-founder, Goes Social With “Jelly”

Jelly is here. No, not a new jar of Welch’s Concord Grape Jelly, but rather Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s Jelly, a social networking app/Q&A platform designed to help users get answers to questions. Rumors had been swirling around Biz Stone’s secretive new project for months, and he finally unveiled Jelly today.

How Jelly works

You can get an answer to a question by posting the question and an image on Jelly. The idea is to leverage the knowledge of all the people in your social networks to get you answers. Biz Stone introduced the new social networking app on the Jelly blog earlier today.

“Jelly is a new way to search with pictures and people from your social networks. It’s also people helping each other—something that’s both meaningful and fun.

Jelly works with your existing social networks. In addition to asking, you may find yourself answering questions as well. Questions can be forwarded outside the app so your friends who don’t have Jelly can still help. Ask questions with images to deepen the context. Crop, reframe, zoom, and draw on your images to get more specific.”

The new app can be downloaded for free at the Google Play app store or the Apple Store iTunes.

Social networking app “designed to search the group mind”

Biz Stone conceives of Jelly as much more than just another Q&A platform. He says Jelly is designed to “search the group mind” and create a more “empathetic” world. In his blog on the company’s website Biz Stone says, “Jelly changes how we find answers because it uses pictures and people in our social networks.”

Biz Stone’s Jelly has been a long time coming

Jelly currently has eight employees – ”half technical, half in product, design, and business operations,” according to Biz Stone.

“We chose the jellyfish to represent our product because it has a loose network of nerves that act as a ‘brain’ similar to the way we envision loosely distributed networks of people coordinating via Jelly to help each other,” he elaborates in his blog post.

Jelly was in active development for almost a year, and Biz Stone had been working on the project himself for a number of months before formally creating the company.

As of 12:45 CT today, Jelly had a total of 25 reviews on its listing in the Google Play app store, with an average rating of 3.9.